‘Fantastic Beasts 2’ Has the Worst Domestic Opening in Harry Potter History

Fantastic Beastsmay be set in the world of Harry Potter, and come from series creator J.K. Rowling, but it doesn’t have quite the same level of box-office drawing power. While the new film did debut with $191 million overseas, it grossed just $62.2 million in the U.S. over the weekend — the weakest domestic debut in the history of both the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts series. Here is the weekend’s full box office chart:

Film

Weekend

Per Screen

Total

1

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

$62,200,000

$14,941,

$62,200,000

2

The Grinch

$38,165,000 (-43%)

$9,216

$126,544,280

3

Bohemian Rhapsody

$15,700,000 (-49%)

$4,121

$127,885,859

4

Instant Family

$14,700,000

$4,474

$14,700,000

5

Widows

$12,300,000

$4,388

$12,300,000

6

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

$4,678,000 (-53%)

$1,775

$43,870,690

7

A Star Is Born

$4,350,000 (-46%)

$2,164

$185,840,907

8

Overlord

$3,850,000 (-62%)

$1,347

$17,742,889

9

The Girl in the Spider’s Web

$2,500,000 (-68%)

$854

$13,290,523

10

Nobody’s Fool

$2,260,000 (-66%)

$1,737

$28,887,618

Even with the addition of Jude Law as young Dumbledore and Johnny Depp as the evil wizard Grindelwald, Fantastic Beasts 2 grossed $12 million less in its domestic opening weekend than the first Fantastic Beasts. The weakest opening in the main Harry Potter franchise was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which grossed $77.1 million in its debut in theaters back in 2007. (Adjusted for inflation, that number climbs to $93.5 million.) Whether this has any implications for Warner Bros.’ plans to make three more of these Fantastic Beasts movies remain to be seen.

The other wide releases of the weekend, Instant Family and Widows, grossed $14.7 million and $12.3 million, respectively. Both cost between $40 and $50 million to make. Of the three new films, it was Instant Family — a comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne about a family who adopt three young children — that did the best with CinemaScore voters. It scored an A, compared to Fantastic Beasts’ B+ and Widows’ B. (That’s not good news at all for the latter, a heist film starring Viola Davis.)

The best per-screen average in the country last weekend was At Eternity’s Gate, the new biopic about Vincent van Gogh starring Willem Dafoe. The film grossed $92,000 at four theaters around the country, for a PSA of $23,000. The news wasn’t all bad for Fantastic Beasts; it did have the second-best PSA of the weekend, grossing an average of $14,941 at over 4,100 U.S. theaters. We’ll see how the film continues to fare with muggles through the Thanksgiving holiday next week.